/
I am an interaction designer, engineer and crafter, currently an Assistant Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, in the Digital Design Department. I am working in the AIR Lab and I am also affiliated to the IxD Lab.
My research combines designing with the body, materials experiences, designing with data, computational crafts and soma design methods. Through practice-based studies I investigate and reflect on intersections of these areas.
I am especially interested in designing technologies that foreground and expose the experiential properties of digital materials and bodily experiences. The interactive artefacts that I develop and study are designed with sensitivity towards materials and with a strong focus on the touch & feel of interaction. Overall, my research is characterised by a strong focus on the body, through an exploratory and critical perspective on movement-based interactions, biosensing technologies, and felt and intimate experiences of actuated materials on the skin.
I did a postdoc at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in the department of Media Technology and Interaction Design, where I worked in the IxD and Soma Design research groups.
I received my PhD degree in March 2018, from KTH Royal Institute of Technology. My Phd was also partly funded by the former Mobile Life VINNOVA Excellence Research Centre in Kista, Sweden. In my PhD dissertation titled Making Preciousness: Interaction Design through Studio Crafts, I studied -both theoretically and practically- the concept of preciousness through crafts for interaction design, including how to design for affective value when developing interactive artefacts. Additionally, I studied the concepts of impermanence, incompleteness and imperfection for interaction design, through the wabi-sabi Japanese philosophy. See here the Interview I gave to BBC Future on this research topic.
Before I started my PhD in November 2012, I was working at the HyperWerk Institute for Post Industrial Design, at the FHNW Academy of Arts and Design in Basel, Switzerland, as a design assistant in the motoco project. In 2011 I graduated from the Aegean University in Greece, from the Department of Product and Systems Design Engineering, located in Hermoupolis, Syros island. During my studies in Syros, I spent six months at Weissensee School of the Arts, at the department of Textile and Surface Design, in Berlin and six months at Köln International School of Design (KISD), in Cologne, after receiving an Erasmus Studies Scholarship. I have also lived in London.
Some of my personal interests outside research and design include: contact improvisation and contemporary dance, aerial acrobatics, photography and making collages with mixed media and embroidery.
You can also find information about me at the Linkedin or at Researchgate.
At the moment you can email me at vats@itu.dk to ask for the full CV.
Before you go check my inspirational Mood-boarding blog!
´